#eclecticfurrywhispers

[spinji]

Is Shigaraki's "ugly" appearance a product of his quirk, AFO'S neglect or both?

Definitely both.

His cracked itchy skin and the frizzy ends of hair imply to me that the decay quirk had the side effect of removing a lot of moisture and oils from his skin; if not outright causing a mild, but consistent allergic reaction. Unsure how much creams and moisturizing products would have helped in the first place, but I'm not convinced AFO tried much in that regard.

In the few shots we see of his room it's disorganized, cluttered, and dirty, so I'm also willing to believe his hygiene and need for cleanliness wasn't consistent either. I'm not saying he never took care of himself, but more in that flighty, "I'll shower tomorrow", "forgot to brush my teeth for a week", "wait, you're supposed to comb your hair how often?", kinda way. That is definitely on the fault of AFO just not teaching him good habits or routine.

I do think when it came to his vital health like disease or organ health he was actually quite thorough, or as thorough one can be when they have so many buffing quirks that he doesn't remember feeling vulnerable to anything. But cosmetic issues like yellowed teeth and split ends were barely addressed, if at all.

Part of him did want to stick closer to the mold, make him as beautifully delicate as Yoichi had been, but he couldn't associate his pure little brother with a symbol of fear. So he let it twist, let it distort; it wouldn't matter how much of a sight his new vessel would be so long as it would submit.

[spinji]

You know how All Might is shown to adopt the shoot-first ask questions later mentality when dealing with villians. Yet All Might understood as far back as his teenage years that it wasn't unusual for victimizers to be motivated by being victims themselves. I think I have a good idea why All Might would go on to adopt a more simplistic mindset later on in life. I just want to hear your thoughts.

I'm actually not sure he did understand the concept as a teenager. He knew being a villain was bad. He knew abuse was bad. But I don't think he ever put two and two together. He has sympathy and a desire to save Tomura AFTER he's told he was Nana's grandchild but was dismissing everything he said about society being broken the first time they met. That desire to save was fueled by personal guilt, not an understanding that villains are often victims.

If he had a Tomura equivalent to give him that understanding early in his career he absolutely would have been more supportive of actually helping potential villains not fall through the cracks but that would be a very different society if that was the case. The era of peace he brought up is the one that created the current era of villains in the first place after all. His ignorance is the catalyst that created the villain Tomura Shigaraki.

I feel like institutions only made this blindness worse for All Might. He wasn't taught this kind of empathy or understanding at UA, not in college, and not by older pros he would have met as a young adult still coming into himself as a pro. Tsukauchi didn't profess these values, neither did Nana or Gran Torino. I'm not saying any of them are bad at what they did, but it was part of a larger cultural blind spot that only had eyes drawn to it when Midoriya saw that desire to be saved in Shigaraki.

Watching/Reading the early series back with all this context is honestly kind of horrifying because it's the characters that break the mold the most at the end of the series that start out believing the same cultural norms as everyone else. And at the time we didn't bat an eye at it either. Hell- Izuku outright says "a hero will show up to rescue them" and is complacent with doing nothing when he initially sees the slime villain attacking Bakugou; the exact same mentality that drove Tomura to All For One.

I do want to emphasize again that I don't think All Might is a bad person or a bad hero. The problem is really that this kind of help for villains was just never expected of him.

[spinji]

Do you have any idea why Nana continued to dehumanize Shigaraki after learning that her murderer groomed him to be evil?

I think what a lot of people don't get with the whole "you might have to kill Shigaraki" thing is that Nana (and Torino by extension) aren't removing his autonomy when they say that.

At a certain point, it doesn't matter who's fault it is for turning someone into a villian. The entire purpose of Deku's rematch with Muscular is to make it clear that some people aren't going to stop destroying things and hurting people by talking about their abusive dad or their dead mom or whatever tragic circumstances led them here.

Tomura has also reached a similar point, refusing to compromise on his goal to destroy the causes of his suffering. That includes both All for One and the society that left him to rot. AFO meticulously planned a lot of Tenko’s misfortune but he didn't manipulate the strangers that passed him on the street. He didn't create that feeling of abandonment, only pointed it in the wrong direction. Tomura not making this choice for himself because he was groomed genuinely doesn't matter anymore because these are his choices now. He's shown multiple times to understand that AFO is using him against All Might and for his own ends, but he doesn't try to get away and turn to the heroes; he tries to get away so he can be a villian on his own terms.

It's easy to forget, since he's the protagonist, but Izuku's optimism about saving the crying boy at the core of who Tomura is, is a massive outlier and his leaps in logic aren't always solid. Nana is very callous when she talks about it, my personal guess is it's because she's still not fully willing to face her sense of guilt that her attempt to save her son from AFO led to the creation and abuse of Tomura. But she is still correct, regardless of what pain lingers inside Tomura, it is too late to help him.

Even when Izuku reaches his hand to Tenko when he is at his absolute most vulnerable, he maintains his loyalty to the league. He's been cast from society for so long that there's nothing that can convince him to stop. He would rather die destorying than live in a world he couldn't change.

In fact most of the major deaths in the league maintain this theme. Twice would rather die fighting than let his friends get screwed over by his own shortcomings again. Toga would rather die a free girl that lived as she pleased than fall in line with society. The heroes didn't choose to kill any of them from the outset, they could have gone quietly at any time to save their own skin, but their cause was more important.

This is what Nana means when she maintains that Shigaraki dying is a possiblity that needs to stay on the table, because he won't allow anything that isn't victory or death. It's tragic but I think it helps convey the message that the ending wants to, that change in how we treat the strange and disparaged doesn't just need to happen, but it needs to happen sooner. You can't just wait until a villian tries to blow up the country to try and help them, you need to give that kindness to everyone before those villians can even exist.

Sorry this got off topic because I really hate how people simplify the ending as bad writing when to me it seems really obvious that Horikoshi was going for a bittersweet ending with the league. They did destroy society but didn't live long enough to see what it rebuit into because even trust in one person trying to save them isn't enough when you're this far gone.

Either way, Horikoshi's writing style leads to a lot of necessary intuiting about the characters to actually understand the motivations for how they act. I think Nana ends up being a particularly rough victim of this because her stoicism and blunt attitude is very obviously supposed to be a front.

She opened herself up to others and All for One killed her loved ones, so she guards her heart the best she can to avoid showing more weaknesses. She does feel like a failure to her legacy; she never fully believes she made the right choices regarding Kotaro or Tomura. But if she cracks then not only is she done but AFO will make it his duty to twist the knife and hurt the people she cried for too.

She's a contrast to Izuku serving as a cautionary what-if scenario if Izuku's big open heart just makes more people targets by association (which it does!). She's not entirely right when she calls Tomura a monster but she isn't being entirely honest with herself either.

[spinji]

In a previous Q&A you claim that Nana was never entirely convinced that ditching Kotaro was the right thing to do. You sure about that? I've assumed that Nana had zero doubts with her decision until she learned that AFO kidnapped and groomed Tenko.

She was still abandoning her child.

All For One tracked down and killed her husband, so she knew Kotaro was next if she didn't completely detach his existence from hers. Abandoning Kotaro was objectively a safer option but she still saw him crying and screaming when they said goodbye. She knew, in that very moment, that this was the worst thing that had ever happened to her child and she was responsible, even if it was to prevent a worse fate at the time.

And honestly? I don't think Nana was ever completely assured this would even work. All For One is a cunning bastard that finds a way to ruin everything that people hold dear. She'd never dare voice it, but there's no way the idea that this only bought Kotaro a small amount of time didn't haunt Nana until she died. That she put him through all of that emotional pain thinking his own mother didn't want him for nothing.

Kotaro lasted longer than she probably would have expected but he still ended up in that thrawl for the sin of simply being someone All For One's enemy loved dearly.

[spinji]

Why did the heroes view Tomura Shigaraki as a 1D-villian after displaying symptoms of unresolved trauma?

I still think about this on occasion and I really think a lot of people forget about it when talking about the villains. There genuinely was no precedent for seeing villains in any context outside of being criminals. Even All Might parrots this idea.

When Tomura was ranting about his need to tear down the symbol of peace at the USJ All Might looks to Midoriya and tells him, to his face, that villains trying to make any kind of argument about the faults of society are deflecting so they can excuse their own desire to do bad. And he warns Izuku not to fall for it, as if it's an intentional deception rather than a crack in the facade that can explain why Tomura is like this and what could be done to help him.

This is why I hate the argument that the ending is weak because hero society doesn't change. I think people making that argument aren't actually clear that THIS WAS THE PROBLEM. It wasn't the billboard charts, it wasn't heroes not being more strictly penalized, it wasn't the prison system, it wasn't the HSPC. The problem at the core of My Hero Academia's society, the problem that let All For One manipulate these isolated and broken people into a threat to the entire world was an inability to recognize villains as human.

This is why the scene with Joki at the end of the manga is so important. Now that the idea that most villains come about from being mistreated or abused with no safety net, people start to rethink how they used to react to these kinds of scenarios. They're seeing suffering first rather than a threat and the fact that Tomura's suffering went on for so long, the fact that things got this bad, will forever be a reminder to never take steps back when faced with people like him again.

[spinji]

Do you think the HSPC stopped more crimes from behind the scenes then All Might did in public?

With any other hero, I would say yes but All Might is a chronic workaholic with the strength to sprint off to tackle any incident he hears even a whisper of. Even at his weakest state he resolved 3 incidents in an hour.

But in general I don't think it's right to compare the two because a policy of punishing criminals as a preventative measure gets really morally questionable very fast.